What do you do if you buy a game and can't play it? The highly anticipated SimCity released a couple of days ago to excellent critic reviews... but to terrible backlash from people who actually paid for it. This is because the game requires an always-online connection, and EA's servers couldn't handle the onrush of eager mayors, effectively locking people out of their game.

Pictured: The SimCity launch, as depicted by its predecessor that has no such DRM.

This isn't a new thing. Last year's Diablo III is guilty of it too, making you connect to the internet even though you were playing single-player, for reasons known only to Activision-Blizzard. The Assassin's Creed games on PC used to have this DRM, before Ubisoft wised up.

Of course, EA could have been copying its nemesis Activision, who published Diablo III, a game that also added always-online DRM to a franchise that was previously unburdened by it. And they got away with it too-- the game sold over 12 million copiesin 2012. Let's not let that happen again.

The games industry, everyone. Games journalism, everyone. Always-online DRM has no place in single-player games. Always-online DRM does not work if the people providing it cannot provide the infrastructure to handle it. As long as this DRM remains, stay away from SimCity. If this is the future of gaming, we'd do better to stay in its golden past: